Thursday, October 2, 2014

"Pro-life Godwin's Law" strikes again...

21 year old Jessa Duggar (of TLC's 19 Kids and Counting) recently joined the ranks of other anti-abortion evangelical who like to trot out the "abortion is like the Holocaust!" line. And in doing, she shows a marked disregard for actual victims of the Holocaust -- who, while presumably being the topic of her Holocaust museum post, are only just referenced in order to get to the more pressing topic of...abortion, of course. As an added bonus? Racism only comes from evolutionary theory. And evolutionary science was the cause of the Holocaust.

Obviously, racism existed long before the theory of evolution came
about, so she is flat out wrong on this one. People were using religion
to promulgate racist ideas long before Charles Darwin came around. Witness the “Curse of Ham” line of thought that Christians used to justify slavery and bigotry or Martin Luther‘s rabid anti-Semitism (that found a welcome home in, of all places, Nazi Germany…).
But
unlike Duggar, I’m not trying to pin the blame for Nazism on one
specific idea. Evil people in general can rationalize malicious acts and
twist most philosophies to their needs. That’s a given. Still, two
things are absolutely undeniable (if you wish to maintain even a
semblance of honesty):

Nazism was embraced by Christians, promoted as Christian, and promoted by Christians
as Christian. (Not by all of them, obviously.) From the belt buckles
that read “God with us,” to the close ties to Catholicism, to the
invocations of Luther, Nazism was rife with obvious and less obvious
examples of Christian influence and support. Ancient Christian anti-Semitism played a huge role in the Holocaust.

Any
evolutionary support people claim for such ideas is just bad science.
Now, religious people will argue that anti-Semitism is bad religion.
That may well be (although, unlike science, the mechanisms to know are
far less reliable — mostly coming down to the opinion of the interpreter). But science can and has demonstrated that such claims are nonsense. There is no evolutionary support for the idea that there are distinct, or more or less advanced, human species, or anything of that nature. So, while anyone can make
that claim, they do so in the face of — not with the support of — solid
scientific data. (Unlike the hundreds of years of established religious
tradition that supports Christian anti-Semites…)